How to Build Out Your 2026 Calendar To Actually Achieve Your Goals

(upbeat music) - What is up, I'm Grace Beverly, and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast shit guidebook on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing, because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice. What is up guys, and welcome back to Working Hard. I really hope you're enjoying the new year reset series. I have been enjoying it so much, like I went into the new year, originally feeling just very blur, like very burnt out end of year chaos. It just, it really got to me, but I actually, I don't know, originally going into the new year, I was like, I'm gonna go light on all the new year stuff, and just kind of settle things and make sure I am feeling, not burnt out and good within myself and everything, but I've actually found throwing myself into more of the new year reset stuff has been particularly beneficial, like I've found it quite refreshing, and I've been able to, I don't know, like I think it makes you a bit apathetic and feel a bit out of control, if you're trying to sort out your whole year, but you feel like your life is running away with you, or you're dealing with all of these issues, or whatever it might be, but what I've found really therapeutic is actually, looking at this year and looking at, okay, how do I make sure that I don't feel this way when I'm coming to my end of year next year? Like what can I really do? Sometimes you being at less of an excited to move forward phase, puts you in a better headspace to actually work out what you need to do, like watch steps you need to change in your life to make sure you are actually, living the life you wanna live, and that your daily actions line up with what that looks like, rather than just, I don't know, I have habits that I make the same mistake again and again and again, just because they're kind of put up who I am, and I feel like being in this headspace for a new year reset has actually been quite useful for me, rather than going into it, feeling like super optimistic and everything. So that's where I've kind of been on it, but thank you so much for all your lovely messages about all of the episodes, and if you haven't listened to any of them yet, politely, what are you doing? This is what we do at this time of year. This is our bread and butter. Like we are so good at new year, we are so good at goal setting, we are so good at improving our lives, and like the whole of January and the end of December has been engineered to make you have the best 2026 possible. So highly recommend listening to all of those episodes, no matter when you're listening to this. I feel like it's always good to give yourself a good reset and a good touch back in. Anyway, today we are getting niche, but when I did the plan with me episode, I spoke about how I distill all of my goals into habits and then put them in my calendar, and a few of you asked how I actually structure my calendar. I am big on color coding. My calendar always looks beautiful. It always looks aesthetic, it's always nice to be presentable, and I know exactly what I'm doing at every stage of my day. And I'm pretty proud of how I do it. So I thought I'd put aside a few minutes to jump on my can actually take you through my system. I genuinely use to run every single system of my life. For me, if I don't have something in my calendar, it's not happening. And that's actually quite a good way of making sure that you are going to execute on the things you say you are going to execute on. And I feel like the harsh truth of it all is actually that whether you are planning your calendar well or not, the calendar is already shaping your life. Like you either run it or it runs you. And so if you feel over scheduled or you keep double booking things or you're always forgetting things or you're saying you've got to start going to the gym or going on a run or calling your mom or whatever and you don't have it in your calendar, the idea of this episode is to be a helpful rundown of how to use your calendar to actually help you reach your goals and to run your life. Like your calendar should feel like your assistant, but really it's you from last week making sure everything's planned out in the way it should be. So I want to talk first about how your calendar can sometimes feel overwhelming. I feel like a lot of the time your calendar feels overwhelming because you are actually not using it enough and that sounds counterproductive because it sounds like, oh, adding more to my calendar would make me more stressed, not less. But in reality, you are doing things every moment of every day anyway. So it might as well be blocked in your calendar so that you can make sure it aligns with what you actually want to be doing. Like the whole reason for a calendar and having it organized well for me personally is not so that I can work more. It's so that I can work less. Like it's so that I can have better control on my life. It's so that I can do more things I want to do and really make the most out of every week and really get the most rest like I can possibly have. If that's not scheduled in my calendar, I'm not going to get it. So I really would recommend if you're not a regular digital calendar user, start using your digital calendar for everything. Just try do it for the whole of January. Obviously you'll have all your meetings somewhere in a calendar. But things on top of that like travel, like I have, for example, this morning I walked to work. I had an hour and 15 block for walking to work and I just knew I looked at my calendar last night and I was like, oh, I'm walking to work tomorrow because me of last week decided I was doing that and I have that for everything. It might be how many times I want to see friends in a week. It might be the at the moment I want to work out three times a week so I'm going to make sure that that is scheduled in my calendar. I really recommend just trying that and seeing where it gets you and then you can add more or less dependent on what feels good for you. But personally I use Google Calendar for my daily calendar and then I use the TPM planners for planning out each day. But I just want to say you could do this on Google Calendar, Notion, Apple Calendar, whatever you use. They all have pretty much the same functionalities. It's the system that makes it rather than platform. But I'm going to go step by step because getting a good calendar, not just color coded, but actually accurate and actually helpful for your life, is very, very important. And step one is you're going to do a time test. So before you even build out your calendar, there is this one exercise that I would really recommend doing and do not freak out, it is not hard. It does take a week, but it doesn't take a week of constant work. So for one week, you are going to track how long every recurring task you do takes you. That might be doing your washing, washing your hair, your weekly nail appointment, writing up your weekly report for your manager, going on your morning walk, anything. You cannot properly time block your week if you don't know how long things you do every week actually take you. And if you're anything like me, the results will actually surprise you. I like to catfish myself into thinking that I can do things in 30 minutes when really they take me an hour. Like I used to every single day think that I could wake up and get out the house within 20 minutes. Every single day, it would take more like 30 minutes than a push. And that was setting me up for failure. Like you have to have a realistic grasp on how long the things you do every week take you so that you can schedule them in effectively and so that you're not filling your time in the wrong way. If you have the eight minute plan, they're actually at the beginning of the plan, there is a time blocking log essentially where you can measure this time, but you can just do it in a table yourself or where you can put it on your notes app or whatever, but you kind of want to have that as a key. It's like a menu for your life and how long your blocks take and all of that. Also get to know yourself because me personally, I need buffers between things. I don't tend to do buffers between meetings. I like to think that I can teleport but that's like needs must based on the amount of meetings that tend to pop up. But for example, I know that I'm going to leave at the exact time my calendar says I'm going to leave. So I'm better off leaving a 15 minute buffer because if someone door stops me on the way out of the office or if I'm getting an Uber and it takes a while to get an Uber or whatever it might be or the train doesn't come, whatever, put a buffer in there and just forget that you ever put a buffer in there. Like I add 15 minutes on every travel thing and I add 15 minutes on every time I'm getting ready because for some reason I think it takes me 20 minutes and it never ever does. So next is step two, create categories for the recurring part to do your life. So it's time to open up your calendar and the first task is to split your life into actual buckets instead of everything being like miscellaneous or work/life. So the categories I have are specific but they will be different for you. Mine I've honed over life but I have Tyler, Shreddy, TPM, Rushgrade, obviously. So those we categorize differently. Then I have podcast, Zeus and Ziggy. So what they're doing, like where are they? What are they up to while I'm at work? And then I have work blocks like when I'm blocking in a time to do something it's not a meeting or whatever it might be. Approvals, gym, personal, travel and birthdays. That feels like a lot, it is a lot but it's beautiful when you look at it in a fully color coded calendar. Basically your categories can be whatever you want them to be but I would really recommend not like just doing personal all in one like personal, should be split into gym and travel and birthdays and I don't know even like a beauty appointment or whatever it might be. I've had to distill mine down because there are so many different color work ones. Whatever works for you but make sure it's not like a huge wide category that spans loads of different things. But once you have your categories you use them as labels. This is your color coding. So each of those things have different colors for me and I've actually labeled them in Google Calendar so it's really easy for me to remember. I don't ever need to remember that like, oh, gray is travel or whatever. Then every time you add a commitment to your calendar whether it is a block, whether it is a meeting, whether it is a gym session, it goes under one of these. And this stops a week looking like a randomized list. Sometimes when people share their work calendars on Instagram and it's all light blue it makes me want to vomit. It is terrifying to me. I would like to see exactly the balance of all of my days and why they look like that but it just starts to feel more intentional and you start to see that, oh, my day looks full which can stress people out by having a full calendar but actually your day looks full but three of those blocks are personal things. Yay, so fun. So at that point we are onto step three which is set yourself a code. Color coding is great but the point of having an organized calendar for me is being able to look at it and in one second knowing exactly what the shape of my day looks like. So I take it a step further and I add a signifying word that tells me what every kind of activity or event in my calendar is from a glance because if I open it on my phone and I can just see like the first three words, I don't know if that's a video call, a call, an appointment, whatever it might be. I want to see at a glance what the specific entry is. So for me these are terms like call, meeting, block, appointment, task, dinner, travel. I put those in at the beginning of every event title with a colon after it. So you will never just see like grace times Sophie meeting in my calendar. You will see meeting big capitals, colon, then what the meeting is. And so that means that I can really easily decipher by looking at my calendar is something a video call. Is it a phone call? Is it an in-person meeting? Is it an appointment like at a glance? And this is one of the areas where I feel having a more neurodivergent brain, he's actually really served me because I cannot take in large piece of information when they're all weighted the same. So like if I were to look at a calendar and it just had words and all of these things, ah, terrifying to me. It's like a block of text without paragraphs in it. It needs to have something where it categorizes it from the second I look at it. And then my diary is beautiful, it looks amazing. And it's exactly what it needs to do. But as I said, it just means that if I'm looking at my calendar on any device, not only do I have the color coding, but I also have this signifying word, which means I can tell what my day or week looks like from one glance, which takes us on step four, which is to add your blocks. So this is where we move your calendar from running you to you running your calendar. You are going to add blocks for the things that you want to do every week or month, but you never get around to. So an example of this could be your monthly finances, check in, all your Sunday, reset, all your Thursday, and everything shower, it may seem silly, but if you don't schedule these things in, the time will disappear, it will get eaten up by other priorities. Like, if I don't have my hair wash in my calendar, my hair is not getting washed. Like if I had a shoot one day, and I didn't wash my hair the night before, it's probably because it wasn't at my calendar. I have to have it in my calendar, so that I know what I'm doing with my time. Because otherwise I will be sitting at home that evening or having a nice dinner with friends, not thinking, wow, I need to get home and immediately wash my hair. But I feel like this is the best way of making sure you're looking after yourself, rather than giving all your time to others, and leaving you scrambling for self-care, or leaving you constantly being like, I wanna go to the gym, but never actually go into the gym. Why isn't it in your calendar? You'd put a meeting in your calendar, 'cause you don't wanna miss it. Why not put your walk in there? Why not put your nice, long Thursday evening bath, or whatever it might be in there? Schedule it in and it will happen. And that doesn't mean you need to do every single thing that you say you're gonna do. Of course, things are gonna slip. Like sometimes I see one night hair wash day, and I think brilliant, I'll have a slip-pack bun tomorrow instead and I will wash it. The next night, but I think it's really about setting yourself up for success, and I look at my calendar the week before every single time, like, so that I can work out if there might be a clash or something that doesn't have enough travel time, or actually when am I gonna wash my hair in that week or whatever it might be. I have looked at that from the week before, the beginning of the week before, I have a block on a Monday to look through the calendar for the next week, and it also means I know like, where are my dogs gonna be? All of those different types of things. Again, it's putting time in to be able to deal with certain things that you might not naturally deal with or you will forget. I will forget anything that isn't in my calendar. But next up is step five, you are going to add your buffer time. This one is a non-negotiable, particularly for people like me that like to think that they can teleport everywhere, add the walking time to your workout class, or even for me, the getting ready time after your workout class, where you're going to be getting ready before you're actually going to work, needs to be scheduled in your calendar, you are not just going to teleport as a sweaty mess to the office, add the 15 minutes that you always need to breathe between meetings or particularly after a big meeting like, you know you will don't want to be going straight into something else. This was something I only introduced last year as I finally came to terms with the fact that I have amazing time management and have a zero time keeping skills because I believe I can do everything at once. But I can safely say that it's changed my life and my nervous system is so thankful for it. And of course, there are gonna be days where like I would love to have more buffers, but there are no buffers anymore. But that's fine, you can't have everything, but at least you know, like I know for example, my next week looks really horrible. Like next week looks like hell, but that's fine. At least I know it and I am prepared for it going into it. And I feel like these are the small pockets that stop that like, that feeling of, I've been running since 8 a.m. and I haven't had one real thought feeling. And it also means that when things do inevitably run over, it's not a disaster. Like I just had a meeting right before this with the run over by 15 minutes, but it's fine 'cause I had a 15 minute buffer. So what you're gonna do, I'm unstoppable. Now finally we're at step six. You are going to add your reminders and your deadlines. So I add reminders for everything. The text I need to send, things I need to post, emails I need to check. I put them in as 10 minute long events that notify me as soon as the event starts. So I don't forget this means that they're all in one place and I get notified at exactly the same time and in the right place for me to actually do them. Sometimes what I even do is like, if I have a super busy week for work and there are loads of things that I need to pick up next week, but it makes me feel anxious like having them hang over my head. I will have like a block in on Monday where I'm just dumping the things from that week. I'm like, I'm gonna get to that then, I'm gonna get to that then, I'm gonna get to that then. I create myself a little checklist in Monday of next week that's like these other things that you now need to check in with. And then finally, I would say an extra little tip is to take half an hour on a Sunday and just add all of your friends and families birthdays into your calendar. It is the easiest way to always be a good friend and to never miss that birthday text. Set it to recurring every year, obviously. And it's one of those things where it's like, I could look in my January, for example, and for some reason every single person I know isn't a curious. So I suddenly have all of these birthdays. And I actually know that I need to buy four people's birthday presents. Like it's not gonna pop up the week before and they're gonna feel like an afterthought or whatever it might be. Another thing I often do for a reminder is like someone has something big and scary. Like they have a meeting for a promotion or an interview or whatever it might be. I'll actually put that into my calendar because I want to make sure I'm gonna be a good friend. But I can really promise you that setting your calendar up like this is gonna completely change the way your work feels. So from one, like, semi put together girl or girl who's only put together because of their calendar to another, use this, try it, tweak it to how it works for you and thank me later. All right, that is your hot girl calendar for 2026. If you have been listening and trying your best to imagine what it actually looks like, I popped it up on the Instagram so you can see a visual. I very much need a visual for everything. But also if you've created a beautiful calendar off the back of this episode, please do send them to me via the Instagram. That's the working hard Instagram. It's just at working hard pod. Then we can all look at everyone's beautiful calendars and what more could I want my DMs to be filled with than seeing what you're doing every day. But I will see you on Monday, have an amazing week and make sure to schedule it in your friend's birthday. So you can be a good friend in 2026.